After the brief “correction” in October, the market basically pulled a Men In Black where it essentially looked at the pen and proceeded to forget the past and resumed its ascendency to record highs. I made a couple of moves on my portfolios to bank some profits and to open some new positions. This is despite my feelings that the stock market is still overpriced.

That’s what happened in February. I did nothing. Why did I do nothing? Well nothing jumped out that motivated me to take any action. You know what? That’s OK. You don’t have to buy and sell stocks for the sake of doing it. You make decisions when they make sense to you and you feel comfortable that you thought things out as best as you can.

For me I think a big reason why I stood pat in February was there was just too much noise everywhere. The Mad King was a couple of weeks into his reign and chaos was ensuing everywhere. There were the tweets and executive orders and court orders and nothing was making any sense. It’s easy to get caught into it and more significantly when you have hysteria surrounding you, it can feed into your decision making and more likely it will feed into wrong decision making.

Now is the hysteria going to settle down anytime soon? It looks like it will not, so we will somehow have to piece together enough concepts that will want to make us take action.

Amongst the hysteria, some clarity could be emerging. We’re getting a sense from the Mad King and his Minions where he stands on various issues that could have far ranging impacts on the US economy and ultimately how business is done. We’ve seen strong language in the areas of trade protectionism, defense, and infrastructure. I spent the month thinking about how these elements could play out and impact stock prices. I’ve talked about them via my Mind Map videos (here, here, and here), podcasts/videos, and my daily tweets. By taking a step back from the hysteria, I feel I’m starting to see some potential opportunities float to the top and perhaps in March, I will start taking some small steps to positioning my portfolios to reflect this. Then again we could the Mad King take things up to another level of stupid and I might back off.